Los Alamos Scientists Mad as Hell

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Los Alamos Scientists Mad as Hell

LOS ALAMOS, New Mexico – Kevin Vixie is livid.

He's one of a number of scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory who are angry with Congress, for launching hearings this week into the allegations of fraud and Swiss cheese security that have already forced the lab's director to resign; with the Department of Energy, for imposing a series of increasingly baroque regulations on their actions; with the media, for continuing to harp on these charges; and with business leaders and former senior managers, whose ethical lapses, they feel, are the root of the lab's ongoing problems.

"I want to be here. I love being here. But I'm out of here, no question, if they continue to make it more difficult to be a scientist," said Vixie, a mathematician in the lab's top-secret X Division.

Scientists have long been drawn to Los Alamos by its fat research budgets and reputation for intellectual entrepreneurship.

"This is one of the only places in the world where you can do blue sky research," that is, science without a specific application, meant merely to satisfy an intellectual itch, said Steven Brumby, an Australian-born physicist in the lab's remote sensing group.

"There's so much money," he added. The lab's $2 billion budget "is more than the entire R&D budget of Australia."

But, in recent years, members of this tiny community nestled in the mesas of northern New Mexico have felt besieged. First there were a series of accidents in the mid-1990s that seriously injured lab employees. Then, in 1999, came Wen Ho Lee, the Los Alamos scientist accused of being a spy for the Chinese.

Now, misuse of lab funds – one employee allegedly attempted to buy a $30,000 Ford Mustang with government money; another tried to finance a casino trip – has triggered a new avalanche of mismanagement allegations. Matters were made significantly worse when the ex-cops brought in to investigate these activities were fired for being too aggressive about digging up dirt.

After six decades, the University of California's contract with the Energy Department to operate the lab is now in serious jeopardy. The House Energy Committee began hearings into the mess at Los Alamos on Wednesday.

If history is any guide, these inquiries will trigger a new set of increasingly stringent rules governing lab employees' behavior. Already, there are new regulations about how employees can spend lab money. Before, workers with government purchase cards could charge up to $5,000, no questions asked. That's no longer the case.

These regulations are becoming an increasing irritant to the scientists – especially since they say they've done nothing wrong. Business managers and senior lab executives were the only ones to violate legal or ethical bounds, several scientists argued.

Despite this, continuing as normal with experiments in recent years has become more difficult, said Tom Asaki, a mathematical physicist in the X Division. "Paperwork blossomed, training bloomed. I have 30 training classes I have to keep up with. There's even a ladder-safety training class," he said.

Foreign nationals can't work in classified areas – a serious hindrance in a field where so many come from abroad.

Another rule, temporarily in effect after the Wen Ho Lee imbroglio, forced scientists to turn off their computers if they left the room.

"If I have a run (of a computer code that takes) eight hours, that means I've got to pee in a bottle," Vixie said.

While Vixie and others say they can accept some broad safety and security guidelines, they believe they are bright enough to govern their own actions.

"We've got a very smart population that's quickly able to realize if an initiative for safety or security is a waste of time. And they get torqued when it is (a waste)," said William Priedhorsky, chief scientist in the lab's nonproliferation division.

But Greg Mello, who runs the Los Alamos Study Group, a lab watchdog, said the scientists are partly to blame for the security problems plaguing the lab. "The lab doesn't want to have too much visible security because it lowers morale, and makes it more difficult to recruit (scientists to the lab)," he said.

Scientists like Vixie say genuinely necessary security measures aren't the issue. It's poorly thought-out regulations handed down from on high that will cause people like him to leave.

"If they make it so foreigners couldn't visit, I'd leave. If they made it nearly impossible to publish, if they made it so we couldn't have a strong peer-reviewed research component, I'd leave," Vixie said. "And these are all things that have been proposed."